Pong and Beyond

665th played so far

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Infinity Ward
Publisher: Activision

How have I not played Call of Duty yet? The series is now one of the biggest out there (although, with the likes of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, we couldn’t quite say that felt right) and its yearly releases always seem to be a big deal for at least some part of the gaming population.

Back in 2003, when the first one was release however, this wasn’t the case. Other military shooters were around – I think – and this just added a new one that clearly hit the zeitgeist somehow. Today’s task is clearly to find out why that is.

Our Thoughts

Call of Duty feels pretty standard, but as the first to really popularize the genre, that almost seems expected. It’s a decent quality military shooter that does the job quite well. It actually feels like it keeps things quite grounded and straight forward, with no real tricks – that’s what makes it work here.

It looks pretty decent and gets a lot of things right straight away – possibly the reason it grew. It has good gunplay and gives some good goals and basic story as you move around, making it more than just killing a bunch of people standing in your way. There are some tactics involved, even if it’s not as much as later, but it works.

What this game did was to set the standard. Others iterated on it, especially graphically, but the core here actually feels good, and the relative simplicitly actually helps it stay more playable than more advanced ‘simulations’